Letter: Children being used, parental rights threatened

In a letter from the South Dakota Department of Education, Secretary of Education Melody Schopp threatened parents, stating parents would be violating South Dakota Codified Law 13-3-55 and truancy laws if we opted our children out of the “field test” assessments.

South Dakota Codified law 13-3-55 states that the state shall “administer the same assessment.”

No two “field tests” will be the same. “Each state-designed test shall be correlated with the state’s content standards.” These assessments are not state-designed.

This law also states that testing “shall measure the academic progress of each student.” There will be no results given to South Dakota schools this year.

Schopp stated that our children are being used to “test the test.”

Parental rights are repeatedly and broadly protected by Supreme Court decisions. It is held that parents possess the “fundamental right” to “direct the upbringing and education of their children.” (Meyer and Pierce) The Supreme Court criticized a state legislature for trying to interfere “with the power of parents to control the education of their own” (Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 402).

In Meyer, the Supreme Court held that the right of parents to raise their children free from unreasonable state interferences is one of the unwritten “liberties” protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. (262 U.S. 399). National assessments will be used to collect private information which will be made available for other entities to use through the federally funded State Longitudinal Data System.

Parents never agreed to have data mining on our children or to have this information made available for other entities to use. Why are parents being threatened and children forced to take these assessments? Without these assessments, the transformation of education fails and the mining of personal data diminishes.